by Jason Snell
The origins of the spreadsheet
An amazing story by Steven Levy from 1984(!) about the creation of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet and possibly the first PC “killer app”:
It occurred to him: why not create the spreadsheets on a microcomputer? Why not design a program that would produce on a computer screen a green, glowing ledger, so that the calculations, as well as the final tabulations, would be visible to the person “crunching” the numbers? Why not make an electronic spreadsheet, a word processor for figures?
An amazing bit of history. As Levy points out, “This was so long ago that I had to define what a cursor was!”